SOURCE: Moriarty, Rachel. “‘Secular Men and Women’: Egeria's Lay Congregation in Jerusalem.” In The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History, edited by R. N. Swanson, pp. 55-66. Suffolk, England: The Boydell Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Moriarty concentrates on what the Itinerarium Egeriae records of the Christian liturgy and congregation in fourth-century Jerusalem.]

Egeria's account of her journey to the holy places has been an invaluable source for study of many aspects of fourth-century Christianity, from liturgy and topography to clerical practice. Dr David Hunt … discusses the part played by monks in Egeria's ‘scriptural vision’.¹ This paper looks at her account of worship in Jerusalem, and particularly at those worshippers who were neither ordained clergy nor committed to life as monks or nuns, whom we can call the ‘laity’.² Egeria herself distinguishes between these groups, and is concerned to differentiate the parts played by each in worship. We shall consider here how much can be discovered about the composition, organization, and spirituality of these lay people, how Egeria herself contributed to the account, and how much is special to Jerusalem.

The study of the early Christian laity is a matter of recovering, rather against the grain of tradition and the surviving sources, the stories of a neglected group. Christian tradition came to set a high value on clerical and monastic status, which was given priority over the laity in ecclesiastical contexts; and sources for early clerical and monastic details tended to be more carefully preserved and more frequently invoked than those concerning lay people. But it is worth sifting these surviving sources for the light they thrown on lay practice, if only to see whether they support at this date the later distinction, and there is much to discover in Egeria's account. Her experience in Jerusalem adds an extra interest, as it served as a geographical and spiritual goal and to some extent as a liturgical model to the pilgrims who visited it and returned to pass on its practice to their own communities.

Egeria's journal, lost for centuries, was recovered in 1884. It contains a description of her travels to Egypt and the Holy Land, with several detailed chapters on the daily and seasonal liturgy performed in the churches of Jerusalem, especially in Holy Week. There are doubts about its provenance, and even its author's name, but it has immense value as an eyewitness account of worship in Jerusalem. The sum of many scholarly studies (and I am especially indebted to Dr David Hunt here) is that Egeria probably made her journey between 381 and 384, and so is roughly contemporary with Augustine and Jerome, and made her visit while Cyril was just still Bishop of Jerusalem—he died in 386. She probably came from the west of Spain or Gaul, and wrote in a vernacular Latin; she reveals a sound Christian background and excellent knowledge of Scripture. She may have been a nun or a lay person—we shall return to that question later—and she wrote her journal as a letter to her ‘sisters’, who shared her religious interests. She is enthusiastic and articulate, an attractive writer who repays study in many ways.³

With careful analysis, Egeria's text yields a picture of the Jerusalem congregation, as they worshipped at the many churches, went to their own and each others' baptisms, reverenced the Cross, joined in processions, attended daily services, and pursued lay Christian lives. Some, like Egeria herself, were pilgrims visiting the Holy Land out of piety or tourism; some came from the monasteries around Jerusalem, and many were residents in the city; they included new Christians and long-standing believers, children, and the aged.

After her account of her travels, Egeria turns (ch. 24) to the daily services in Jerusalem, a subject she knows will interest her correspondents (24.1). The doors of the Anastasis (the great church on the site of the Resurrection) are opened for worship just before cockcrow. ‘All the monks and nuns are present, and there are lay people there too, men and women who have been prepared to get up early enough.’ Immediately there is a distinction between groups, and an expectation of lesser, or different, liturgical obligations; but it is not clear who these devout lay people are, why (apart from sleepiness) some come and some do not, nor how they will spend the rest of the day.

After services come the blessings of the catechumens and of the faithful (24.2). These catechumens are always blessed separately, and kept away from the eucharist and the bishop's teaching sessions; as the bishop makes clear to them, ‘While you are still catechumens you can't be told about the more secret mysteries of God’ (46.6). Who were they? Egeria distinguishes catechumens (cathecumini) (24.2, and passim), candidates for baptism (conpetentes) (45.2), and the newly-baptized (infantes or neofiti) (38.1 and 39.3; 47.1), though it is not always clear precisely how the groups are differentiated. At any rate, these catechumens, though regular churchgoers, have not yet qualified for baptism or prebaptismal instruction. Augustine, some years earlier, was enrolled as a catechumen at birth, but only moved on to baptism after many years,⁴ and earlier still Hippolytus mentions a period of three years' study for catechumens.⁵ The parallels are not exact, but it seems that these catechumens were not short-term visitors, and many may have been young.

Worship continues throughout the day with a significant congregation (omnes (24.3), or omnis multitudo (24.4)). The evening service, Lucernare, includes a group of children (pisinni), who respond ‘kyrie eleison’ after each name commemorated in intercession (24.5): is this, as one easily assumes, a rehearsed children's choir—Egeria mentions their ‘loud’ (or is it ‘numerous’?) ‘voices’ (voces infinitae)? Could these children have belonged to monastic ‘schools’ like the ones Basil founded for girls and boys in Caesarea, the children of active Christian parents, many future monks and nuns?⁶ Was there such a seminary in Jerusalem, to provide liturgical responses when necessary? Wilkinson, perhaps beguiled by Anglican parallels, has them as a boys' choir, possibly engaged also in more formal rehearsal and psalm-singing,⁷ and Gingras sees them as no more than ‘children of God’, the devout congregation, and quotes a later passage where the newly-baptized are described technically as ‘infantes’ (39.3), but this seems strained here.⁸ It is hard to be precise, since the Latin pisinni seems to mean children of both sexes, and the verb responderunt need not imply singing. Whoever they are, the picture does seem to include young people in the liturgy.

Early on Sunday morning, after ‘gathering songs’ and a lamp-lit service so moving that ‘even the hardiest weep’ (24.9), ‘some of the lay men and women choose to stay in their places until daybreak, while the rest go back home to bed’; clergy on a rota keep vigil with the people (24.12). Sunday had been protected by legislation since Constantine's time: is Egeria applauding particular lay diligence here, or contrasting clerical and lay styles?

Festivals brought an influx of visitors into Jerusalem. Egeria notes that ‘not only the religious, but lay people as well, men and women’, gather there for Epiphany (25.12), and at the Feast of the Dedication, the dies encaeniarum, lay men and women and monks come from every province (49.1), considering it a grave sin to be absent, except in emergency (49.2). The visiting element increased again for the ceremonies of Passiontide and Easter, when the holiness of the land and the season came together. The rigorous Lenten season which preceded it included fasting, in which all shared as they felt able (28).

Holy Week is the real test for the Jerusalem Christians: services follow the pattern of Christ's Passion, and this means rushed meals (30.3) and a heavy schedule of processions, accompanied, it seems, by a sympathetic programme of pastoral support. Egeria conveys all kinds of detail, from the archdeacon's announcements to the composition of processions. On Palm Sunday, ‘all the babies, and those who are too small to walk, are carried on their parents' shoulders, holding branches of palm or olive in their hands’ (31.3). In the previous paragraph (31.2), Egeria seems to understand these children as the counterparts of the infantes who welcomed Christ to Jerusalem, who do not appear as children in the Gospel narrative (Matt. 21.9); but the details seem to leave little doubt that there were real children in the Jerusalem procession. It would be hasty, however, to move straight from there to the idyllic modern ‘Christian family’. As Gillian Clark has pointed out, fourth-century Christian practice did not always treat children as we should like to suppose.⁹ Besides the children there are older men and women, matrone and domini, whom we may render either ‘senior citizens’, or ‘people of consequence (of both sexes)’, all on foot; the procession goes slowly ‘so that people don't get tired’ (31.4)—some, perhaps, are unused to being pedestrians. Here can be glimpsed more of the planning needed for this event, the careful announcements of time and place, the meals quickly prepared, the concern about weariness and lateness.

Hints of it continue in the liturgical marathon of Holy Thursday when, after a long afternoon's service, the people hurry home for another hasty meal (35.2) before the all-night vigil and the walk to Gethsemane and back, undertaken with singing and lamentation by everyone, even the smallest, in spite of the weariness caused by late nights and fasting (36.2-3). On Good Friday morning the bishop sends them home after the vigil, to sit down (36.5). They return for the moving climax of the day, to see and reverence the True Cross, an opportunity which had once been abused, as Egeria explains, when a worshipper bit a piece off and made away with it. The fate of the relicbiter is not known; Egeria is careful to note the practical arrangements made since to protect the Cross by posting deacons round it, and to organize the large congregation into lining up, touching the wood with forehead and eyes, and then kissing it, before going on to other relics nearby. This must have involved a considerable amount of organization to keep things moving and to ensure, in such large crowds containing many strangers, that unbaptized people and catechumens did not attend the mysteries; it is not clear whether it was done through a core of dutiful and instructed worshippers, or by tight control.

For the ceremonies of Easter Egeria does not include details of the paschal vigil and the ‘spine-chilling’ surprise of baptism; that is, she says, just like what we do at home (38.1). Fortunately, Cyril's account survives.¹⁰ By dawn on Easter Day, the strain is beginning to tell on all but the stronger and younger worshippers (37.9), and the clergy lose no time in bringing the ceremonies to an end and sending the exhausted worshippers home (38.2).

It may be that Egeria shrank from discussion of the secrets of the baptism service, but in the final paragraphs she touches on baptism preparation. By the time they enrol at the beginning of Lent, baptism candidates are known to their fellow-worshippers. ‘It is not very easy for visitors to qualify for baptism, unless they have references from someone who knows them’ (45.4). Once scrutinized, they settle down with the bishop to a daily teaching session, together with some of the fideles—but no catechumens, of course. The three-hour sessions are accompanied by loud shouts and many questions—a noisy and lively class, with homework. There is interpretation from Greek into Syriac, or, if necessary, Latin (47.3)—was the same offered for the services? The explanation of the baptism service, which takes place after Easter, is accompanied by applause so loud it can be heard down the street. Egeria goes on to describe the Dedication festival—but here the text ends, and whatever followed is lost.

Before these indications can be put together to make a picture of the congregations, a few points need to be considered. The first concerns Egeria herself, for her own position may help us to evaluate her evidence. Do her status, as a nun or a lay person, and her female gender make any difference to her perception, or to our understanding of it? From the surviving text itself one would assume her to have been a lay person, in the absence of any indications of monasticism, and this is now regularly and reasonably argued: Maraval sees her correspondents as ‘un cercle des dames pieuses’, rather than nuns, and Egeria herself as wealthy, independent, and influential;¹¹ and Hunt convincingly suggests that she may have been part of Theodosius' own Spanish connection, even setting out in his company for the Council of Constantinople in 381.¹² Yet, from the seventh century, the monk Valerius saw her as a nun (sanctimonialis) and also as a woman forging feminine weakness into iron strength,¹³ and these views were generally adopted when the text was rediscovered. This new view of Egeria as a lay woman has a wider significance in study of the text, and may affect conventional assumptions not only about lay people but also about women in the fourth-century Church.

To begin with the question of laity and ‘religious’: at this period, we must be careful how we interpret the boundaries between them. In spite of Egeria's apparently precise terminology, with its distinctions between clergy (clerici), monks and nuns (described as monachi, monazontes, or apotactites), and the people, described as laici, fideles, saeculares, or ever populus,¹⁴ differences were perhaps more practical than spiritual, and the liturgy was shared by all. Some scholars see the Jerusalem rites as ‘hybrid’, in blending public (or ‘cathedral’) and monastic worship¹⁵ but it is better, perhaps, to see them as a base from which the two later diverged as differences hardened. On one hand, daily worship for all was already frequently recommended and practised,¹⁶ and there are examples of individuals and groups of lay people, like Sidonius and Prudentius from the west of Europe, practising private asceticism;¹⁷ on the other, fourth-century monastic practice varied, especially for wealthy women, and some, like Jerome's friend Marcella and Gregory of Nyssa's sister Macrina, combined a serious monastic commitment with conventional domestic life.¹⁸ Meanwhile, monks themselves did not always live up to expectations, as Jerome noted.¹⁹ Egeria's active engagement in liturgical spirituality is of a kind which later Christians easily saw as nun-like, and thus, often, superior to lay activity. She belongs to a network of people with a shared interest in Christian observance at home and on pilgrimage, who see faith as a collective activity, closely related to liturgical observance. Such networks nowadays are often linked, as ‘tertiaries’, for example, with religious orders or lifestyles: but perhaps we see here a more independent fourth-century lay pattern, whose boundaries with monasticism are blurred.

Next comes the question of Egeria's gender—and this is one of the few surviving pieces of early Christian writing by a woman author. Once, it might have been seen to explain a certain domestic concern, as her status as a nun explained her piety; but that cannot now really be supported. She does not show the meekness later expected of women—but that may be a function of wealth rather than gender. Whenever she mentions lay people they are described as ‘men and women’—but whether that is to contrast the Jerusalem experience with her own, or to make a general point, is, tantalizingly, not clear, but it is itself significant. Being female, like being lay, does not appear to have made any difference to her experience or her explanation; and this lay woman's account is confident, responsible and equal, and shows no sense of inferiority.

A second general point concerns Jerusalem. The Christian city with its churches and shrines, and the accompanying ‘stational’ liturgy, linked to particular places and events, had been established within the last fifty years as a setting for pilgrimage and visits, and designed for large crowds of visitors.²⁰ It sprang from a new conception of the holiness of place, especially the holy places. Jerusalem was a model, and as historical Christianity had once spread from it, so its practices were transplated elsewhere, especially in the form of daily services,²¹ and of hymn- and psalm-singing, notably to Rome and Milan.²² Egeria's account is part of the dissemination, and perhaps standardization, of practices which began there, though it is not always possible to distinguish the familiar from the exceptional. We should, perhaps, take as seriously the attitudes and assumptions about people as we do the details of liturgy which she offers.

So what about the congregation? Because of the special position of Jerusalem, its worshippers also formed a pattern of their own; as one would expect, the number of clergy and monks, as well as of visiting pilgrims, was disproportionate. But from various indications it seems that there was a substantial regular congregation. The evidence for this concerns, first, what is said about the composition of the congregation, especially catechumens and baptismal candidates, and second, the picture of the church organization. Here is a large all-age group of worshippers adopting a demanding Christian programme, but expecting to follow a less stringent pattern of daily churchgoing than the ‘religious’, presumably dictated by the other demands of their lives, or by age or infirmity. The congregation includes catechumens, some of whom will enrol for baptism—and for this they need a record in the community. Egeria seems to assume a core congregation of long-standing Jerusalem residents, not wholly dedicated to pious observance as pilgrims would be, though it is not possible to distinguish long-staying visitors like Egeria herself, ‘refugees’ like Melania and others later,²³ and permanent residents, some attracted to the idea of living there because it conferred ‘spiritual blessings’.²⁴ These rich and distinguished visitors must have been joined by others who were less aristocratic, perhaps including the parents who carried their toddlers in procession (31.3).

The question of organization throws interesting light on ancient management of large crowds in unfamiliar and complicated activity. Equivalent modern services rely on well-prepared stewards, a fair proportion of worshippers familiar with the routines, and a good system of communication within the clergy team and between them and the congregation. We know from the Cross-biting episode that things could go wrong in Jerusalem, so how was the rest managed? Egeria reveals more than one might expect. Deacons, whom we have seen guarding the Cross, seem to be in charge of discipline, in collaboration with others. The congregation is well-informed, and presumably could recognize their catechumens, and information is flexibly updated. Egeria herself made a friend in Jerusalem, the deaconess (diaconissa) Marthana (23.2), and such contacts might help to pass on practical details to pilgrims—but she says nothing about her own sources, beyond the information given in church notices. These are carefully recorded; from the observation that ‘people give in their names [for baptism] before the beginning of Lent, and the priest makes a note of them’ (45.1), to the archdeacon's announcement on Holy Thursday afternoon (35.1), ‘We shall all meet in church at seven—there's a hard night ahead!’ These scraps of information, easily ignored, contribute to a picture of a close-knit group, in touch with one another, and thoughtfully organized, and this is supported by the evidence of pastoral concern for less stalwart worshippers. There is another issue, which Egeria does not consider: the organization of lay people's time to accommodate worship.

To a modern reader, the pattern recorded by Egeria would be incompatible with many kinds of daily occupation: what are we to make of the work and social position of these people? Wealthy and leisured pilgrims (like Egeria) could dispose of their time, and were in any case in Jerusalem expressly to make the most of its worship; many wealthy residents would have been in the same position. Christian life was usually lived within a Christian setting, and Christian households, like secular ones, would dispose of the time of others, as employees, slaves, and dependants. Churches had always worked as communities (Acts 2.45-6), and deployed their members in church activity.²⁵ The increase in the numbers of Christians allowed lay people's time to be organized across a large part of the community so that those in employment could go to church (or even so as to require them to go).

In his famous work on liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix suggests an increase in Jerusalem in the number of ‘domestic ascetics among the labouring classes’, who could choose to devote their leisure to religion, and ‘a considerable Christian public’ with ‘leisure to attend frequent public services’.²⁶ There are, perhaps, questions about the social structure, ‘leisure’, and individual choice which this implies, but Egeria's account supports the picture of a Christian community able to arrange time for daily worship. This is further strengthened by evidence from elsewhere—in Milan, Monica was ‘habitually at the church’.²⁷ All this is not in harmony with the disreputable population of Jerusalem to which Jerome disparagingly refers in a letter; but as Hunt points out, Jerusalem had been a cosmopolitan community since the Jews were driven out.²⁸ For Christians to form part of such a city, running their own community by their own rules, is not hard to imagine, though the social and economic implications of this would repay further study.

We have considered our original questions on Egeria's Jerusalem congregation for its membership and organization. Can we say more about its spirituality? Several points emerge. First, Egeria does not, like Augustine, reveal much of her personal spirituality, except through references to the groans and tears of worshippers at poignant moments. The spirituality of her congregation is expressed through liturgy shared and shaped by the worshippers. The Jerusalem liturgy was not simply the reflection of an existing faith, but its whole context, the setting in which faith was learned, explained and experienced. This picture, which comes as much from Cyril as from Egeria, matches what we have seen of her own experience of a shared and practical Christian faith, and the development of the public stational liturgy in Jerusalem.²⁹

Second, Egeria's account, again reflecting what is known of her, shows an independent and responsible commitment. Participation in worship does not seem to be clerically induced, but voluntary—in spite of the ‘grave sin’ of absence, sanctions are not mentioned, and the clergy are as much assistants as initiators in the Christian life. It may be that Egeria's wealth rather than her status determined this for her; but it is notable that, in spite of the many converts to faith, this individual participation and commitment is so evident. It is revealed in the hymn-singing, the processing, the lively baptism classes—the congregation is not a passive follower, but the dynamic heart of worship.

Third, this congregation clearly takes account of the demands of earthly life. Ascetic and monastic patterns are acknowledged, but allowance is made for other pursuits and priorities of time: no blame is attached to those who return to bed on Sunday morning, or who cannot fast excessively. There may have been more variety than Egeria notes. Perhaps this acceptance both of lay responsibility and of the different demands of lay religious obligation is the most attractive and encouraging feature of Egeria's account.

These questions are linked closely with Jerusalem itself. Every worshipper, especially those from the West, must have felt a special conjunction of place and time, the magic opportunity to share Christ's path in the newly reconstructed city. Jerusalem, the goal of pilgrimage, led people back to the beginning of Christianity, and from there out again to their lives and churches, full of new worship and a new vision of Christ and his disciples. At this period, it was Jerusalem that governed this cycle, pumping round the Christian world models for many kinds of Christian practice, lay as well as clerical. Its waves still flow today.

Notes

1. E. D. Hunt. “The Itinerary of Egeria: Reliving the Bible in Fourth-Century Palestine.” In The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History, edited by R. N. Swanson, pp. 45-54. The Boydell Press, 2000.

2. These terms, in a modern context, are imprecise and open to question: clergy, it is argued, do not lose their ‘lay’ status, and religious communities include ‘third orders’ or ‘tertiaries’ who are not completely inside them. I shall use the word ‘lay’ to mean those not formally ordained or living in religious communities; but, as the paper shows (p. 61 [Moriarity, Rachel. “Secular Men and Women: Egeria's Lay Congregation in Jerusalem.” In The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History, edited by R. N. Swanson, pp. 55–66. Suffolk, Eng.: The Boydell Press, 2000.]), there was a comparable ambiguity in Egeria's time. See Jacques Fontaine, ‘The birth of the laity’, in Bernard McGinn, John Meyendorff, and Jean Leclercq, eds, Christian Spirituality, I: Origins to the Twelfth Century (New York, 1985), pp. 453-75.

3. Textual references in brackets are to Egeria's work, from the following editions: John Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels to the Holy Land (3rd edn, Warminster, 1999) [hereafter Wilkinson]; Egeria, Diary of a Pilgrimage, ed. and tr. George E. Gingras, Ancient Christian Writers, 38 (New York and Ramsey, NJ, 1970) [hereafter Gingras]; Egérie, Journal de voyage (itinéraire), ed. and tr. Pierre Maraval and Valerius du Bierzo, Lettre sur la Bse Égérie, ed. and tr. Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz, SC, 296 (Paris, 1997) [hereafter Maraval]—this includes the Latin text, from which quotations are taken. Besides the commentaries in these works, the following form the basis of these summarized conclusions: David Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312-460 (Oxford 1982), and Robert Wilken, The Land called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven, CT, and London 1992).

4. Augustine, Confessions I, xi, 17; V, xiv, 25; VI, xi, 18. For translation, see Saint Augustine, Confessions, tr. Henry Chadwick (Oxford 1991), from which references are taken.

5. Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition, 17, in Hippolytus, a Text for Students, ed. Geoffrey J, Cuming (Nottingham 1976).

6. Basil, Regulae Fusius Tractatae (The Longer Rules), XV, 356, D-E, trans. in W. K. L. Lowther Clarke, The Ascetical Works of St Basil (London 1925), pp. 175-8.

7. Wilkinson, pp. 51-2.

8. Gingras, p. 241 n.396.

9. Gillian Clark, ‘The Fathers and the children’, SCH [Studies in Church History], 31 (1994), pp. 1-27, and Fontaine, ‘Birth of the laity’, pp. 472-3, who quotes Augustine, On John, 51.13.

10. For the text of Cyril's Baptismal Homilies, see Edward Yarnold, The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation (Slough 1972), pp. 65-95.

11. Maraval, p. 27.

12. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, pp. 164-5. There may even be a political implication here, so soon after Theodosius had issued his edict Cunctos populos in 380, which set Roman Christianity as authoritative throughout the empire (Cod. Theod., XVI.1.2; text in J. Stevenson, ed., rev. W. H. C. Frend, Creeds, Councils, and Controversies (London, 1989) [hereafter CCC], p. 150). There is some doubt about its effect, but it would surely have seemed significant to western Christians like Egeria and her community.

13. See the ‘Letter of Valerius’, 1 and 4-5, translated in Wilkinson pp. 200-4, and Maraval, pp. 323-49.

14. For discussion on the differences between these terms, see Wilkinson, pp. 46-8.

15. See W. Jardine Grisbrooke, ‘The formative period: cathedral and monastic Offices’ in Cheslyn Jones et al., eds, The Study of Liturgy (London 1978), p. 358.

16. Ibid., pp. 360-1.

17. See Anne-Marie Palmer, Prudentius on the Martyrs (Oxford 1989), chs 3-4, on Sidonius Apollinaris and his ‘circle of like-minded litterati’, and Fontaine, ‘Birth of the laity’, pp. 453-75.

18. Jerome, Ep. 127 (trans. in CCC, pp. 197-200), and Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina (trans. in W. Lowther Clarke, The Life of St Macrina (London, 1916)).

19. Jerome, Ep. 22, 34, trans. in CCC, p. 166.

20. Wilken, Land Called Holy, pp. 113-14, and Wilkinson, pp. 60-4. As he mentions earlier (p. 8), the notion of pilgrimage to holy places was not supported by all.

21. Especially at Rome and Milan; see Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (Westminster, 1945), pp. 329-30; and for Milan see Augustine, Confessions, IX, vii, 15.

22. See Grisbrooke, ‘Formative period’, p. 367.

23. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, p. 199.

24. Wilken, Land Called Holy, pp. 122-5; he quotes Leo's advice to Eudocia, Ep. 123, and Jerome's idea of the patria of the Lord, Ep. 108.

25. See the account of the Church in Rome in 250, in Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, VI, 43, 11-12, translated in J. Stevenson, ed. (rev. W. H. C. Frend), A New Eusebius (London, 1987), p. 232. Augustine's conversion, though individually undertaken, caused him to give up secular work in favour of Christian community life: Confessions, IX, ii, 4-iii, 5.

26. Dix, Shape of the Liturgy, p. 329.

27. Ibid.; and see Augustine, Confessions, IV, ii, 2.

28. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, p. 150; he quotes Jerome, Ep. 58.

29. See Paul Meyendorff, ‘Eastern liturgical theology’, in McGinn, Meyendorff, and Leclercq, Christian Spirituality, p. 354; and Wilken, Land Called Holy, pp. 113-14.